4160 Tuesdays: Over the Chocolate Shop
The Most Realistic Chocolate Fragrance, Uncomplicated
There's always an almost tangible softness in the air when chocolate is being heated. Things get very synesthetic: dry, matte cocoa powder with its cool, satin-like flour texture, gets smokier and aromatic once dropped into a cup of water, making a lightly sweet incense. Bars of chocolate being warmed and melted bring up the thick glossiness of your favorite lipstick, and you'd swipe some onto your lips if you hadn't already aged past six years old. Undertones of toasty butter make your brain sense chewiness, although you haven't yet eaten anything.
Dark and salty, buttery and rich.
Those are the words most fitting for Over the Chocolate Shop.
Chocolate is everyone's favorite note in the gourmand fragrance world, so it’s been done in very many ways. I've sampled a lot from that category, but this gorgeous little memory from 4160 Tuesdays is my favorite when I want the most literal and least complicated of all the chocolate scents.
Genius self-taught perfumer Sarah McCartney loves putting her sense memories into her work, and I'm starting to think she's my karmic sense-memory-twin because her scents have a magical way of putting her intentions directly into my mind in a slightly surreal “Powder” (the movie) way.
When you smell Over the Chocolate Shop, you can easily imagine an afternoon in a busy center street—all the modernity of a city like London, with quick chip shops, curry take-out places, smart cafes and noisy corner pubs. Those fast-paced streets sometimes hide little homes amongst the businesses, too, though. McCartney has shared that memories of spending time in a home above a chocolate shop are exactly what inspired this fragrance, and that doesn't really come as a surprise to me when I smell it.
The baking and making of all sorts of treats are bottled here for us so we can live vicariously through Over the Chocolate Shop. It’s a beautifully accurate representation of dusty, dark cocoa powder mixed with liquor-like vanilla and milky, dark caramel. Hazelnut and praline give it an earthier sweetness than simply a sugary one.
If you’re a gourmand fragrance fan, you probably have several iterations of chocolate already in your collection. But if you don’t have this one, then you might be missing out on the most realistic take on chocolate that I’ve yet to smell. Others do chocolate as part of a larger composition, or sometimes it’s more metaphorical, but if you love the idea of a true-to-life chocolate scent, then this is it.
